Sestriere, Italy – Bode Miller looked ragged in the first run of the Olympic giant slalom Monday, but at least this time he had a reasonable excuse.

The U.S. Ski Team’s underachieving superstar hit a rock with his right ski about five gates into his run, causing the steel edge to peel off from the middle of the ski to the tail, and he did well to finish the run in 12th place. Miller rebounded with the fourth-best second run to finish sixth in the race, his fourth without a medal. Miller took a silver medal in GS at the 2002 Olympics.

To avoid going home empty-handed, Miller will have to succeed in Saturday’s slalom. He has finished only three of his past 14 slalom races going back to December 2004, when he won a World Cup race here.

Austria’s Benjamin Raich won the gold medal, his first medal of the Games. Joel Chenal of France took the silver and Austrian Hermann Maier captured the bronze, his second medal of the Games.

There’s not much a racer can do when he loses an edge, a thin strip of sharpened steel that helps the ski bite into the slope.

“At that point you do whatever you can to get through the finish, because you can’t do what you normally do,” said assistant coach John McBride of Old Snowmass. “You can’t lay the ski over and get the kind of response you would on a normal day.”

McBride said rocks sometimes get stuck in the slope when water is “injected” to create an icy racing surface.

“It’s not that common, but it happens,” Miller said of hitting the rock. “Maybe once a year.”

Miller’s result was the good news for an increasingly discouraged American team, which has managed only one medal here in seven alpine events. Erik Schlopy finished 13th after an admittedly timid first run. Daron Rahlves and Ted Ligety failed to finish the first run.

“I was checking speeds over some of the rolls, and apparently other guys weren’t,” Schlopy said. “Once you get in the course you go with instinct. That was my instinct. It ended up wrong.”

Men’s head coach Phil McNichol was unusually somber. Ligety’s gold medal in the combined is the lone achievement for a team that expected to collect multiple medals.

“It’s clearly a disappointment for the guys, it’s clearly a disappointment for me,” McNichol said. “To put in the kind of work we have as a group the last five or six years, to know what the guys are capable of, to know what our expectations are and the expectations of everybody who’s finally watching ski racing, to bring a team of three, four guys with medal potential and fall on our face … Now I have to strengthen myself for the next six months of answering, ‘Why did you guys fail?’ I know how much success the guys have had, how hard the guys have worked.”

The day had the feeling of the end of an era. Rahlves is retiring, Schlopy is 33 and Miller’s not sure if he will return. “I don’t know,” said Miller, 28. “I don’t know yet.”

The Post's ski and Olympics writer, Meyer covered his 12th Games last summer in Rio de Janeiro. He has covered five World Alpine Ski Championships and more than 100 World Cup ski events. He is a member of the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame and Colorado Running Hall of Fame. He regularly covers running and the Colorado Rapids.

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